Situation: A new marketing leader at a major cloud service provider wanted to dig deeper on feedback she was hearing that the company had lost traction with developers, both with the friendly developers as well as winning the hearts and minds of cloud-native developers. She understood the importance of developers (and the applications they build) to long-term health of the cloud business but needed to act quickly if changes were to be made to the GTM strategy, resource alignment, and field guidance in time for next fiscal blueprints and budgets.

Actions: Teabush Consulting conducted a SWOT analysis interviewing over 50 people internally and externally, from EVPs to individual sellers. A consistent set of themes surfaced that supported both initial hypotheses (e.g., lack of clarity across organizations on developer segment priorities for investment), as well as pleasant surprises (e.g., their cloud services were being used by an almost equal percent of cloud native devs as classic devs) that were supported by additional third-party research.

A developer GTM investment strategy framework was created to guide fiscal year investments, plotting developer segment addressable markets, current penetration of each, and the strength of company’s product truths. In just eight weeks, a white paper, walking deck, custom developer segmentation, and a GTM strategy bubble chart were delivered with recommendations on DevRel, sales, and marketing resource allocations for brownfield, greenfield, and whitespace opportunities, including how to optimize the good will being generated around newly announced AI services.

Results: The leader and her team have an unbiased, fact-based approach for making investment decisions in the field, able to dispel myths with data-backed recommendations. The investment framework provided a common ground for engineering, product marketing, and the field to align on execution priorities, allowing their teams to accelerate time to market for developer content, readiness, and programs. A new approach to nurturing cohorts of developers, before the company even knows who they are, promises to attract new developers building on their PaaS products, providing the optics on what content and programs help most, and improving return on investment.

Summary highlights

• Conducted a qualitative study of a major cloud service provider’s developer engagement, interviewing 50 people from EVPs to individual sellers, informing resource reallocation decisions in the field and at corporate

• Delivered a custom developer segmentation and SWOT analysis, providing a third-party view of opportunities, creating alignment across functions, accelerating time to market for programs and content

• Created a GTM strategy, priority-setting framework, triangulating multiple data points for a single view of the opportunity landscape for consensus building across the company

700% growth in marketing influenced pipe, increasing the cloud revenue for the company from 5% to 52% of total revenues. The strategy included transitioning from product to solutions marketing, improving the value prop, executing vertical 1:few ABM campaigns, implementing a digital revenue engine, and securing cross-functional stakeholder alignment around changes in process and definitions of success. Implemented a GTM playbook for field marketing where breadth digital campaigns were executed globally, and integrated marketing guidance was provided for local agility and execution.

Unified a team of senior product, sales, and marketing leaders around a common set of launch success metrics for the company’s first commercialized SaaS offering, allowing teams to then move quickly against deliverables. Presented to the CEO and secured approval for resources needed. Spearheaded a corporate rebranding initiative that would coincide with the launch moment in time. Rallied product marketing and corporate marketing teams around the moment where press, campaigns, partners, sales, and employees would create a surge in the market. ARR grew by over 100% over eight months, and customer acquisition goals surpassed 120%. Marketing KPI attainment exceeded goals: 124% for impressions, 388% for engagement rate, and 125% of press mentions.

Over the years, Tricia has established a repeatable framework for how to go to market, with distinct owners, processes, and deliverables at each moment-in-time stage: T-, T, and T+ (where "T" is Day 0). This approach was instituted for Microsoft's Connect(); event for open source developers, partnering with engineering to align their roadmap to specific dates, thereby allowing marketing to create a surge in the market beyond always-on marketing. This multi-year, integrated marketing effort at Microsoft successfully grew the number of active developers on Azure from 1 million to almost 4 million in under three years, surpassing the 3 million goal.